The development of early psychology of religion: a Dutch falsification of the received view

This article takes issue with the received view of the history of the psychology of religion. Contrary to the presentation of "the" psychology of religion by Beit-Hallahmi in JHBS (1974) as declining after 1913, this article (1) states that the psychology of religion has never been a homogeneous enterprise, but rather a multiform one, with very different developments in different countries, and (2) presents the history of the Dutch Godsdienstpsychologische Studievereeniging [Study Association for the Psychology of Religion; GPSV] as one of the falsifications of the received view. The GPSV existed in the 1920s and as one of its most notable activities, it organized in 1926 the first international conference for the psychology of religion, an event described in some detail.     

Spontaneous recovery of consummatory behavior, but not of consummatory successive negative contrast

Five experiments were designed to study spontaneous recovery (SR) in two situations involving consummatory behavior: consummatory successive negative contrast (cSNC) and consummatory extinction (cE). SR of consummatory suppression should occur if incentive downshift induces an egocentric memory encoding information about the emotional reaction to the downshift that is counterconditioned or extinguished during exposure to the downshifted reward. SR of cSNC failed to occur after resting periods of 24, 96, or 336 h interpolated following complete (Experiment 1) and incomplete (Experiment 2) recuperation of consummatory behavior, and was not induced by the opioid-receptor antagonist naloxone (2 mg/kg), known to enhance cSNC (Experiment 3). However, SR of consummatory behavior occurred across sessions in cSNC (Experiment 3) and cE (Experiments 4-5). Furthermore, naloxone facilitated cE without affecting SR (Experiments 4-5). These results are discussed in relation to evidence for the development of an egocentric memory of the aversive downshift experience in consummatory situations.     

Set recognition as a window to perceptual and cognitive processes

The Set visual perception game is a fertile research platform that allows investigation of perception, with gradual processing culminating in a momentary recognition stage, in a context that can be endlessly repeated with novel displays. Performance of the Set game task is a play-off between perceptual and conceptual processes. The task is to detect (among the 12 displayed cards) a 3-card set, defined as containing cards that are either all similar or all different along each of four dimensions with three possible values. We found preference and reduced response times (RTs) for perceiving set similarity (rather than span) and for including cards sharing the most abundant value in the display, suggesting that these are searched preferentially (perhaps by mutual enhancement). RT decreases with number of sets in the display according to a horse race model, implying independence of simultaneous searches. Central cards are included slightly more often, but set card proximity seems irrelevant. A supplementary experiment determining dimensional salience showed consistent but individual preferences, yet these seemed not to affect set identification. Training induced gradual improvement, which generalized to a new version of the game, suggesting high-level learning. We conclude that elements of perception such as similarity detection are basic for finding sets in this task, as in other real-world perceptual and cognitive tasks, suggesting the presence of basic similarity-perceiving mechanisms. The findings confirm the conclusion that conceptual processes are affected by perception.     

An algebra of human concept learning

An important element of learning from examples is the extraction of patterns and regularities from data. This paper investigates the structure of patterns in data defined over discrete features, i.e. features with two or more qualitatively distinct values. Any such pattern can be algebraically decomposed into a spectrum of component patterns, each of which is a simpler or more atomic “regularity.” Each component regularity involves a certain number of features, referred to as its degree. Regularities of lower degree represent simpler or more coarse patterns in the original pattern, while regularities of higher degree represent finer or more idiosyncratic patterns. The full spectral breakdown of a pattern into component regularities of minimal degree, referred to as its power series, expresses the original pattern in terms of the regular rules or patterns it obeys, amounting to a kind of “theory” of the pattern. The number of regularities at various degrees necessary to represent the pattern is tabulated in its power spectrum, which expresses how much of a pattern's structure can be explained by regularities of various levels of complexity. A weighted mean of the pattern's spectral power gives a useful numeric summary of its overall complexity, called its algebraic complexity. The basic theory of algebraic decomposition is extended in several ways, including algebraic accounts of the typicality of individual objects within concepts, and estimation of the power series from noisy data. Finally some relations between these algebraic quantities and empirical data are discussed.     

From a Distance: Pastoral Care and Theological Education

Abstract. This article is a presentation and discussion of a seminary course on the Corinthian Correspondence. The pedagogical model for this course was structured to parallel the pattern of Paul's pastoral care from a distance as he relates to the Corinthian congregation by personal visits, delegations from and to the congregation, letters from and to the congregation, and unofficial grapevine types of communication. The course was designed for dispersed students to interact with the Corinthian letters, with each other, and with myself as instructor in ways that 1) simulate a first‐century exchange between congregation and apostle and 2) facilitate careful interpretive work on the message of these letters, including their contemporary relevance.     

Deconstructing executive deficits among persons with autism: implications for cognitive neuroscience

Individuals with autism demonstrate impairments on measures of executive function (EF) relative to typically developing comparison participants. EF is comprised of several processes including inhibition, working memory and set shifting that develop throughout the lifespan. Impairments in EF may appear early in development and persist, or may represent a more transient delay which resolves with time. Given the unevenness of the cognitive profile of persons with autism, understanding the development of EF poses methodological challenges. These issues include those related to matching measures and the choice of comparison participants to which the performance of persons with autism will be compared. In the current review, we attempt to break down the processes of inhibition, working memory and set shifting among persons with autism. We propose to do this within a developmental perspective that highlights how matching measures and comparison participants can affect the interpretation of research findings.     

Formal distinctiveness of high- and low-imageability nouns: analyses and theoretical implications

Words associated with perceptually salient, highly imageable concepts are learned earlier in life, more accurately recalled, and more rapidly named than abstract words (R. W. Brown, 1976; Walker & Hulme, 1999). Theories accounting for this concreteness effect have focused exclusively on semantic properties of word referents. A novel possibility is that word structure may also contribute to the effect. We report a corpus-based analysis of the phonological and morphological structures of a large set of nouns with imageability ratings (N = 2,023). High- and low-imageability nouns differed by length, etymology, prosody, affixation, phonological neighborhood density, and rates of consonant clustering. On average, nouns denoting abstract concepts were longer, more derivationally complex, and emerged in English from a different distribution of languages than did concrete nouns. We address implications for interactivity of word form and meaning as pertain to theories of word concreteness, lexical acquisition, and word processing.     

Formation of visual "objects" in the early computation of spatial relations

Perceptual grouping is the process by which elements in the visual image are aggregated into larger and more complex structures, i.e., "objects." This paper reports a study of the spatial factors and time-course of the development of objects over the course of the first few hundred milliseconds of visual processing. The methodology uses the now well-established idea of an "object benefit" for certain kinds of tasks (here, faster within-object than between-objects probe comparisons) to test what the visual system in fact treats as an object at each point during processing. The study tested line segment pairs in a wide variety of spatial configurations at a range of exposure times, in each case measuring the strength of perceptual grouping as reflected in the magnitude of the object benefit. Factors tested included nonaccidental properties such as collinearity, cotermination, and parallelism; contour relatability; Gestalt factors such as symmetry and skew symmetry, and several others, all tested at fine (25 msec) time-slices over the course of processing. The data provide detailed information about the comparative strength of these factors in inducing grouping at each point in processing. The result is a vivid picture of the chronology of object formation, as objects progressively coalesce, with fully bound visual objects completed by about 200 msec of processing.